Wilbur is the pig. He is a timid creature, very fat and frightened, and he never changes although he risks his life for his friend at the end of the book, and that is a brave and heroic thing to do. Charlotte, of course, is the spider. She is a unique creation; there is nothing else like her in literature. She is very spidery and yet she is lovable, too. Templeton is the rat. He is completely unlovable. Yet we love him anyway. So it is with the books of E.B. White. He has us in his spell and we cannot escape.
If you read Charlotte’s Web when you were a child, but are embarrassed to be seen reading it now when you are grown up, there is a simple solution. Have a baby, and read the story to him or her. That way you will share a great pleasure.
JAMES THURBER
1894–1961
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
James Grover Thurber—who was Jim to everyone, including me, a friend—was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894. He was educated at Ohio State University and like so many Midwesterners at the time gravitated to New York, where he tried to make a living as a writer and illustrator. He was hired as managing editor of Harold Ross’s new magazine, the New Yorker. It was not long before he captured E.B. White. They wrote books together, and Thurber published his extraordinary, sardonic cartoons. The New Yorker was known for its cartoons and many of the cartoonists became famous, but none more so than Thurber. He never stopped drawing his incredible men and women and his even more incredible dogs even after he became blind, or almost blind—he could see large black lines on a yellow background, which was enough. Well, not really enough, because Thurber became angry at the world that had let him go blind and took it out in all sorts of ways that are irrelevant here.
Thurber also wrote stories for the New Yorker. Many are well known, especially those in a wonderful book called Fables for Our Time. It is very Thurberish, which is a very good thing to say about it. His best-known and probably best-written story was called “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Mitty is a shy, hen-pecked man who can’t rebel against his wife’s determined tyranny but at least can imagine he could. He is driving the car and his wife is driving from the back seat, and he imagines all kinds of wonderful alternative lives, as a surgeon about to conduct a difficult operation, for example, or an Air Force ace in the World War. The story was the basis of a musical comedy and a film, which were fun but not as much fun as the story. Thurber also wrote a successful Broadway play called The Male Animal, which was produced in the little Connecticut town in which I live and where he lived too, with me playing the male lead. Jim and his wife Helen sat in the front row. Thurber applauded and said it was the best performance of the play he had ever seen, which was nonsense of course but satisfying even so. For me it was a very Thurberish experience.
Thurber died in 1961, after a long period of frustrated unhappiness. The New Yorker had stopped publishing his stories, which were probably not as good as those he had written in the Thirties. He was now totally blind and dependent on his wife, who was also unwell. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died and said goodbye but not in so many words. A good selection of his funniest works are to be found in The Thurber Carnival (1945).
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
1892–1982
Selected Poems
Archibald MacLeish was born in a Chicago suburb in 1892, the scion of a wealthy Midwestern mercantile family. He graduated from Yale in 1915 and, after army service in the World War, gained his Ll.B. from Harvard in 1919 and practiced law for three years until, in 1923, he decided to write poetry full time. An expatriate during the 1920s, he moved in the literary circle of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others. He published two books of poems that were influenced by Pound and Eliot. In the 1930s he became deeply concerned about the threat to American society and to world democracy. Conquistador, 1932, was the first of his “public” poems and won him the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes. America Was Promises, 1939—the title was intended to shock readers into an awareness of the threat the country faced—was followed by The Irresponsibles. He was named Librarian of Congress, 1939-44, and was an Assistant Secretary of State, 1944-5, when he aided in the foundation of UNESCO. His Collected Poems, 1952, won another Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and his hit Broadway play, J.B. (1958), won a Pulitzer for drama. He taught at Harvard from 1949 to 1962 and was a lecturer at Amherst from 1964 to 1967.
It was a great career, and he was a wonderful man. In their later years he and my father were best friends and recorded several conversations on videotape. He also wrote two wonderful poems that deeply influenced my understanding of poetry and life. One, “You, Andrew Marvell,” was a kind of response to Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” In the poem a man lies on a beach in Massachusetts and imagines the passage of the evening from Ecbatan to Kermanshah, from Baghdad through Arabia to Palmyra, Lebanon, and Crete, over Sicily, and “Spain go under and the shore/Of Africa, the gilded sand,” and now “the long light on the sea—And here, face downward in the sun/To feel how swift, how secretly,/The shadow of the night comes on…” It is, simply, magical.
“Ars Poetica” is just as good. The title is taken from Horace’s famous Art of Poetry, and it describes a way of writing poetry that not everyone has adopted but is wonderful all the same. The poem lists some things a poem should be, for example, “Motionless in time/As the moon climbs,” “equal to,/Not true,” “For all the history of grief/An empty doorway/and a maple leaf,/For love,/The leaning grasses and two light above the sea,” and concludes
A poem should not mean
But be.
The poem demands a great deal from you, the reader, but it is worth whatever is asked. For example, the lines, “For all the history of grief/An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” Why is the doorway empty? Who has gone through it perhaps never to return? Is the maple leaf green or red—is it summer or autumn? What did the leaf mean?
MARK VAN DOREN
1894–1972
Selected Poems
My father was born in a small rural town in Illinois in 1894, the son of a country doctor. He went to New York for graduate study shortly before World War I and after he returned from the war to complete his studies and to teach at Columbia University. This made him a New Yorker; but he much preferred to New York the abandoned farm in Cornwall, Connecticut, that he and my mother bought in 1923 and about which he wrote many of his poems. He was a professor of literature and the author of many volumes of criticism, novels, short stories, and literary biographies. But the main business of his life, as he saw it, was writing poems. He walked across a meadow to an old mill near his farmhouse and wrote almost every day. He usually tried to complete a poem, or a part of a poem, each day. He used to say that anyone can start a poem, but it takes a poet to finish it.